History of Colonialism

One hundred and sixty-nine years after colonial scholars first started rewriting India’s history, most Indians still don’t know the full story of colonialism.

Illustration: “Types de nez, de profil” from Éléments d’anthropologie générale

By Pseudo-Mary Elliott and Jazmine Hughes
Published April 20, 2023

Sometime in 1854, an English history book, Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History, Applied to Language and Religion, was published in the City of London, advertised as the essential facts in the emerging science of speech. Contained in the work was a nine-page section on “The Arian Settlers and Aboriginal Races of India” that claimed Sanskrit had been introduced in India by conquerors in some very remote age. The argument, citing earlier ethnological accounts of India, hinged almost entirely on re-interpreting the Sanskrit word anâsas in ancient texts to mean “noseless.“ The colonial administrator Sir Herbert Hope Risley, writing almost forty years later in India, remarked “[n]o one can have glanced at the literature of the subject and in particular at the Vedic accounts of the Aryan advance without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India.“ By the end of the century, the framework—in which race, language, and culture were seamlessly connected—had become the de facto explanation for the Indian historical universe.

Re-interpretations of ancient texts were not uncommon—texts have been at the center of struggle for power since the invention of writing—but they had not been based on race. Colonial scholarship, which grew out of studia humanitatis (“studies of humanity” or the Humanities) during the early modern era, developed theories of natural history that enabled in certain important ways forms of social existence that were commercialized, racialized and inherited. Large bodies of people—in some cases entire regions—came to be seen not as part of society at all but as commodities to be bought, sold and exploited. Though India had a long tradition of writing history, the nine-page section reified theories of ancient India as petrified in social differences “such as we find between the Spaniard and the Negro.”

The broadside pictured above shows a figure from Éléments d’anthropologie générale published in 1885 classifying ethnicity based on the ratio of the breadth of a nose to its height. Developed by the French anthropologist/anthropometrist Paul Topinard, “narrow” noses (Types 1–5) indicate European origin; “medium” noses (Type 6) are the “yellow races”; and “broad” are either African (Type 7) or Melanesian and Australian aboriginal (Type 8).

No. 1/ Justice, War, and the Imperium 

In the 15th century, the campaigns to conquer Iberia from the Moors—the Reconquista—began moving southwards into the coast of Africa. These overseas expansions, however, started diverging from Christendom in Europe, creating peripheries that acted more like captive markets. In 1526, Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I), the King of Kongo, wrote a letter to João III, the King of Portugal, protesting the permissiveness with which Portuguese trading agents established shops and the destabilizing effects of the salve trade. The differences were starker in the New World, where Catholic missionaries wrote with growing alarm about the destruction of las Indias, and abuses of power in the encomienda system. In 1550, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, convened the Junta of Valladolid to debate the morality of the campaigns in las Indias, in which proponents of the conquests argued barbarism justified the subjugation of los indios. Eventually other European states — France, England, and the Netherlands — began seeking overseas colonies similar to Portugal and Spain. With these efforts, a new model of power came into being. It was endorsed by the European states and based on race, and it resulted in one of the most violent periods in human history. Tens of millions of people died not only from disease and malnutrition but also brutal working conditions in European colonies. The exploitation of colonized regions helped bring the modern world into being, including colonial empires. In the colonized world, status began to be defined by race and class, and whether by custom, case law or statue, freedom was limited to maintain the enterprise of colonialism and ensure power.

Mappa mundi

De Insulis inventis

Estado da Índia 

Seven Years’ War

Cultivating Wealth and Power

The Treaty of Allahabad (1765) transformed the East India Company (EIC) from a joint-stock company into a state actor, the Mughal Emperor assigning the right to collect revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha to the EIC—“nothing remaining to him [the Soubah of these Provinces] but the Name and Shadow of Authority”—EIC officers later transforming the grant into a license to exercise arbitrary power in India, thus beginning ‘that career of illegal and legal plunder.’ In 1770 the regions experienced a famine, reportedly caused by a monopoly in provisions, rumored at the time to have killed three million people, prompting Robert Walpole, the former prime minster of Great Britain, to remark with shock “we have outdone the Spaniards in Peru!“

No. 2/ Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia  

“It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.“ So begins A Fragment on Government, the document that eventually led to the development of Utilitarianism. But the words point to the paradox that colonial rule in India was built on: Even as British jurists wrote about acting according to principles of progress, they maintained colonialism and avoided the issue in history. Indians, however, seized any opportunity to secure their freedom. Some fought in rebellions, whether in armed revolts or peasants uprisings. Others engaged in debates amid growing criticisms of Indian society from Christian missionaries. In Bengal groups began to form to represent cultural knowledge in rational terms—but their development was also accompanied by the loss of monastic institutions, whose sources of patronage had steadily eroded under colonial land policies.

Yet the balance of intellectual power continued to shift to colonial scholarship. In 1817, James Mill published The History of British India—“A Critical History“ of India based on European accounts. Mill, who was involved in the development of Utilitarianism, dismissed Indian historical narratives as fictions of a crude people, writing “[i]n the still more important qualities, which constitute what we call the moral character, the Hindu, as we have already seen, ranks very low; and the Mahomedan is little, if at all above him.“ The work had an enduring impact in Britain, becoming part of the moral case for colonial rule in historical discourse. The establishment of the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit at Oxford University in 1832 marked an arguably bigger turning point in studies of India, setting the stage for more foundational re-interpretations of India’s ancient history. Previously, Europeans interested in translating Sanskrit texts had worked with traditional scholars in India. This began to change with development of Sanskrit departments in European Universities, with academic scholars like Rudolf von Roth arguing “a conscientious European interpreter may understand the Veda far better and more correctly than Sāyaṇa“ or other traditional commentators.

Asiatick Society

Brahmo Samaj

Confessions of a Thug

India as Lawless

Minute on Education

Liberalism as religion—English vs Vernacular—Real Morality of Colonialism: false generosity nourished by death, despair and poverty.

No. 3/ ‘Time-Sense’: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India

As manufacturing eroded and the social fabric unraveled, colonialism became more systematic, codified and regulated — as did India’s foreign trade. The

The steamboats, railways, and telegraph reconfigured India’s political economy in gross ways, the outward appearance of benevolence obscuring their economic structure was a drain on India’s economy—part of a program for “drawing up riches from the banks of the Ganges and, squeezing them down upon the banks of the Thames“— the unequal terms acting to deepen India’s transformation “from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce,” exacerbating social tensions and increasing economic dependency.

Indian Indenture System

Indian Arrival Day:After Slavery There Was Indian Indenture, Wage Labor, Migrants

Opium Wars

Doctrine of Lapse

The British Rule in India

“Historical materialism” Asiatic Mode of Production

No. 4/ Historians and Historiography: Situating 1857  

The many interpretations of the Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857 within India’s national literature reflect the event(s) undecided place in India’s history—from “the last effort of the dethroned feudal potentates to regain their power“ to a vast upsurge against colonial rule—stemming from a fractured national historiography and the knot of a colonial discourse prefacing the event(s) as “the most signal illustration of our [English] great national character ever yet recorded.“

“The Mutiny In India”

Queen Victoria’s Proclamation

Ross Island Penal Colony

From Sepoy to Subedar

Civilizing Mission

No. 5/ The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600-1990

The spread of the loanword caste, from the Iberian casta, in India reveals the degree to which British attempts to catalog Indian society as “petrified in the merely natural classification” succeeded in giving legal form to colonial scholarship—locating the cause of India’s predicament to an imaginary past, even as colonial administrators argued elsewhere “in India, that haughty spirit, independence, and deep thought, which the possession of great wealth sometimes gives, ought to be suppressed.” Europeans had been describing Indian society in terms of caste since the Portuguese. But when they tried to conduct a caste census they found the reality did not fit their model.

Criminal Tribes Act

Great Famine of 1876–1878

Hakenkreuz

Caste Encoded Into History

United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind: Caucasian vs Aryan, Annihilation of Caste: Pathologizing Indian Society

No. 6/ Indian Nationalism 1885-1905 

The creation of the Republic of India marked the culmination of a multigenerational freedom struggle—representing a new compact calling on the people of India “to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell,” tempered by a partition displacing millions in the Name of a Two Nation Theory—a coincidence of opposites underscoring competing ideas on national identity that continue to shape politics in India and abroad.

National Party

Hindi–Urdu Controversy

Bengal Partition

Non-Violent Movement

The Discovery of India

No. 7/ Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography

The historiography of the Long Peace masks “a condition of Warre of every one against every one” that has made the job of know thyself difficult for every one—the celebrants, for whom such “traumas are no more than occasions for it [the ego] to gain pleasure,” and the discontents, who take arms against “a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.“

UN Commission For India And Pakistan

TROIS MONDES, UNE PLANÈTE

Indian Cinema

Hippie Trail

Orientalism, Free Movement, Rainbow Capitalism

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